Fractal geometry in African settlements and design
Geometría fractal en asentamientos y diseños africanos
- Date
- s. XVI-XIX (documentado) · confidence low
- Place
- Logone-Birni, Far North, Cameroon
- Credited to
- Kotoko, Ba-ila and other peoples
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Palaces, villages and textiles organised by repeating the same form at ever smaller scales, like enclosures within enclosures. Some designers explicitly used recursive rules.
Studied by Ron Eglash (African Fractals, 1999). The date is that of the documented examples; how far the recursion was intentional in each case is debated.
What it led to
- urbanism through self-similarity
- African ethnomathematics
- recognition of recursive concepts outside academic mathematics